You need to get calories from somewhere, should it be from carbohydrate or fat?

Friday, January 31, 2014

TV Pantomine or the Oxford study

I don't ever watch television (we have no digital decoding box, the TV is for DVDs) and I can't waste the time to watch this performance on the internet.

There are two truisms I love.

First: How can you tell when a politician is lying? You see their lips move.

Equally good: Any semblance of television documentaries to real life is purely accidental.

For a lesson in how to stack a real study against low carb this Oxford group beats any television entertainment hands down. Also, if you ignore the crap from the researchers, there are lots of interesting (pro LC) data in this study, especially the myocardial energetics and body composition.

What they found, and which made the tittle of the paper, was the gem that LCHF eating "impairs cardiac high-energy phosphate metabolism". Baaaad?

What I really liked was that despite "9% lower cardiac PCr/ATP (P< 0.01)" there was "no change in cardiac function".

Feeling like crap in the early stages of ketosis (Atkins Flu™) is common, it's usually at its absolute worst at about a week in to ketogenic eating. This group clearly knew how to time their cognitive testing! They have more of an agenda than I do.

Both the study and the TV drama have the potential to injure people who need ketogenic eating, I guess the TV show more so than the Oxford study, because it is more likely to stop grass roots level defections from Weight Watchers to genuinely healthy fat-based eating.

70 comments:

Similarly, I won't watch it, seen enough foolishness of that sort to last a lifetime, but I did wonder, what happened to the famous water weight?"fat" twin lost less fat but more weight so we are supposed to think he lost muscle.I guess water weight is a concept you can pick up or discard to suit your bias.For what its worth, I think any significant water retention is a symptom of diseased metabolism (dropsy, ascites, oedema) and the loss of water weight, especially the loss of more than the small amount normally associated with glycogen, on a low-carb diet is a reason to celebrate.

A couple of the authors from the Oxford study were also involved in this - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23533158

I had a bit of trouble figuring out what they were trying to achieve, but thankfully they summarised it as "insulin resistance, induced using a high fat diet model, was associated with impaired hippocampal function."

Their lipid infusion method sounded interesting. I had to look up Acipimox...sounds nasty.

It is getting dangerous for the people with impaired critical thinking skills to have an assess to the materials of scientific research.Conclusion:"Raising plasma free fatty acids decreased myocardial PCr/ATP and reduced cognition, which suggests that a high-fat diet is detrimental to heart and brain in healthy subjects." It is getting normal for me to feel like some anty-scientific phenomenon.

However, even TV show could have a negative impact on a particularly vulnerable part of population.

Unfortunately, gross misrepresentation isn't only a feature of mainstream entertainment/thinking, but also an insidious feature of well-meaning and 'passionate' people.

Whereas the tide was predominantly favourable to a lower-carb approach with Paleo for the past couple of years, it now seems to have shifted to a higher-carb one.

This certainly isn't all bad: it can encourage people to realize that health doesn't just start & end with the management of dietary carbohydrate levels.However, people then jumped the gun in ASSUMING (for example) that the changes in T3 levels in people on a LC-Paleo diet *must* be pathological.

I'm ready to believe you; T3 levels and other thyroid hormones SHOULD change when radical fuelling shifts occur within your mitochondria. Now support your claim(s) that this isn't simply an adaptation but a pathological change. #Show-me-the-data

It was more shocking than the mail article suggests - I had to explain the mess to many friends and colleagues I have been helping in past months - helped in turn by my study of your material a while back in fairness:

..............

From the ridiculous conditions of the "experiment", the bets are off anyway, but:

• Blood Serum Triglyceride was not quoted when referring to results, nor were the HDL/LDL or Trig/HDL ratios mentioned, or any reference to NMR analysis which would need to be done to make any inference after a month…………just total cholesterol, which won’t change much anyway even if they did the experiment properly

• The high sugar twin had raised insulin following the glucose challenge – this is completely expected with high sugar/carb and is bad as a given:

o but the pseudo-doctor danced around it by saying “your body’s ability to produce insulin has improved” as if that was good. He then says: “Your body has probably just got used to dealing with the glucose” (Excuse me? Is there a real doctor in the house?)o The video cuts briefly(?) and then sugar twin compares his situation to drinking too much alcohol and his body “got better at managing it” (so it’s kinda ok to drink loads of alcohol then, is that it, idiot-twin-doctor?); uncomfortable by now, the pseudo-doctor feebly corrects him by qualifying yet again “your body has become better at producing insulin”, perhaps realizing that by now he’s in territory beyond his understanding, or ability to be truthful….!o It gets better - they ask him “is it good or not?” – now he’s getting queasy and says “emmmnn in the short term it is…..it is good”, then he says “in the long term it might be….. might be…..might produce a problem” (yeah, like Insulin Resistance, MetS and DM?)o Outrageous stuff – hard to believe really - one more comment follows to close.....

• Then the 100% Fat twin had high blood sugar following the Glucose CHallenge; so let’s take a little look at the pantomime that ensued:

o The fat-moron-twin is in Physiological Insulin Resistance after a month of 100% fat o So, he then gets hammered with a sudden bolus of sugar in the Tolerance Test – what happens?o Well, surprise surprise his blood glucose straight after is relatively high, as the science would dictateo But our poor pseudo-Doctor doesn’t have a clue about any of this, and says “your body is not responding to Insulin as well as it did” (yes, for reasons he has no concept of) and then “eventually your body will stop producing insulin if you continue” – thus proving his ignorance beyond a reasonable doubt.o Amazingly he gave the above BS advice to this high fat twin, and danced around giving it to the high sugar twin, where the prognosis of road to diabetes would have been correct!o Disgraceful.

This is some of the most shambolic science/medicine I’ve ever seen, conveniently dropping the 50-year universal “fat causes bad cholesterol” rubbish to suit the telly, not quoting the Triglyceride levels which would have been interesting, and finally mumbling insulin/glycemic anti-science in desperation; I’ve said before that it would take a decade to deconstruct the “high carb is good, fat is bad” edifice, and recently I thought it might be sooner with the anti-sugar articles appearing in the media, but with the population being fed this drivel I think I’ll go back to the longer estimate……very sad indeed. To quote Bastiat again:

“Yes, we must admit that our opponents in this argument have a marked advantage over us. They need only a few words to set forth a half-truth; whereas, in order to show that it is a half-truth, we have to resort to long and arid dissertations.”

I found Richard Lehman's take on what is and isn't diabetes to be refreshing. He's coming from a position of defending statins (though not very strongly you will notice) against claims they cause diabetes.

" Some people may want an absolute risk reduction of 0.01% — that’s their affair. Others may have an irrational fear of all tablets and simply not take them whatever their risk — and there is nothing we can do to change that. Given such a free choice, “compliance” or “adherence” become meaningless terms.

That’s the way I see this issue. If a statin makes your muscles ache, you simply stop taking it. A recent study showed that most patients can be successfully started back on a different statin, though that is not my experience. I think — though I do not know for certain — that this applies to every adverse effect attributed to statins, including the rise in blood sugar which takes some people over the arbitrary threshold into “type 2 diabetes.” I would like to know more about the reversibility of this: I hope it is similar to the “diabetes” caused by thiazides, which stops when you stop the thiazide and has no prognostic importance anyway, since it is just a short-term biochemical effect of the agent and does not indicate beta-cell damage. If you are interested in the herd, rather than the individual, then the benefit of the statin in this borderline group outweighs any conceivable harm from a small rise in fasting blood sugar. But again, it’s up to the individual whether to carry on taking the stuff or not. You are not going to feel any different whether your fasting sugar is 6.5 or 7 and the odds are that you will live longer taking the statin, though not by much."

It seems to me this applies to any minor show of IR or change in FBG or OGTT response caused by things we have chosen freely and can change if we ever need to.(Pre-diabetes is only pre-diabetes if, persisted in, it does actually become diabetes. We don't have pre-asthma or pre-cancer or pre-stroke diagnoses - yet).The more important thing is what effect diets will have on the complications of diabetes, the damage to microvasculature and nerves, to eyes, kidney, limbs and liver.It's not looking good for sugar twin. But then, sugar twin had to be eating less protein than fat twin, so maybe it's a protein experiment.

Why does the production of constant high insulin output cause damage to beta cells?

I have a theory of the over-simplistic mechanical sort.

Insulin contains an unusually high % of cysteine. So you have these cells that are diverting part of their cysteine supply into the hormone they produce. If they keep doing this at high levels, where does their glutathione come from? These cells are vulnerable to oxidative stress. In fact they need glutahione to keep the insulin from forming inside the cell, the S-S bonds are meant to snap together when the protein hits the more oxidising environment outside.There's a tension there that most cells don't face.Immune B cells have a similar situation with antibodies but luckily antibody resistance isn't such a thing, antibody production is varied, and B cells are replaced as necessary.

Researching this possibility turned up a related alternative one - excess insulin production means more free cysteine is exposed in beta cell to this risk. Maybe.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16644696

Ah, this is better, more in line with first theory and realities of Beta-cell cysteine demandhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19100738

We examined the expression of the major H(2)S-producing enzymes, cystathionine-beta-synthase (CBS) and cystathionine-gamma-lyase (CSE). CBS was ubiquitously distributed in the mouse pancreas, but CSE was found only in the exocrine. Freshly isolated islets expressed CBS, while CSE was faint. However, high glucose increased the CSE expression in the beta-cells. L-Cysteine or NaHS suppressed islet cell apoptosis with high glucose, and increased glutathione content in MIN6 beta-cells. Pretreatment with L-cysteine improved the secretory responsiveness following stimulation with glucose. The CSE inhibitor DL-propargylglycine antagonized these L-cysteine effects. We suggest H(2)S may function as an 'intrinsic brake' which protects beta-cells from glucotoxicity.

A lot of people told me that the life in US made them suddenly turned into fat individuals. I never lived in UK, but it is hard to to imagine that the life-style and food habits there should be very different than in US. I am afraid the way how meat is produced in US makes huge difference. I am not a particular proponent of all-organic eating, but I try to choose a grass/pastured-fed animal products (eggs, butter, organ meats,imported cheeses,heavy cream, NZ lamb) here as much as I can afford.

Yes the programme was pretty bad. But one result was interesting: the high-fat twin's raised fasting glucose. He wasn't eating any fruit or vegetables, which means the same thing could have happened to him that happened Ron Krauss's subjects. Krauss found that the combination of red meat and saturated fat can cause metabolic syndrome. He thinks it's to do with saturated fat increasing iron absorption. No fruit or vegetables means deficiencies of things that protect against excess iron.

Probably, it is important to add that Ron Krauss found only extreme amounts of red meat beyond anything what normal humans consume to be metabolically damaging"Ron Krauss – Saturated Fat? Red Meat? It Depends . . ." http://www.meandmydiabetes.com/2012/04/17/ron-krauss-saturated-fat-red-meat-it-depends/.we just discussed it on the Woos's blog. Ron Krauss said "to begin with, keep in mind, this was a very high beef diet. People were eating beef breakfast lunch and dinner. So this is really way outside of what we would ever consider to be a usual health practice. Maybe some people do it. But not many. We were really interested in the metabolic impact of this diet"Also from the article "It might seem silly to emphasize that, but we really need to say it more than once — that the improvement was due to increasing fats and reducing carbs, because that’s backwards from how most people think it works."

@Galina,I'm not so sure. If that Krauss interview was concerning this studyhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22031660then it wasn't high beef at all:"participants consumed for 3 wk each in a randomized crossover design two high-beef diets in which protein replaced carbohydrate (31% E as carbohydrate, 31% E as protein, with 10% E as beef protein)."10% cal as beef protein high? Maybe for Krauss, but not for me.Anyway, that doesn't mean that Jane is right regarding "No fruit or vegetables means deficiencies of things that protect against excess iron." What thing are in fruit and vege that aren't in meat exactly? And how does this pertain to LC diets that would never consume 31% carbage?Anyhow, who cares. Less red meat and sat fat for Jane and Krauss means more for me.

@Michael Frederic,You are right - in the provided link actually mixed diets were studied, not low-carbohydrate/high-fat diets which we are discussing now, and not mostly-beef-3-times-a-day as R.Krauss said in his interview, probably I just misunderstood him. I mostly agree with him saying "it depends...".

The LC twin ate not only beef, but, according to the picture, pork (sausages are made mostly from pork) and cheeses.I don't think I am competing with anyone for a red meat yet, but just recently during a grocery shopping I though about how convenient it was not to have a need to buy a lot of vegetables - then I would either pay too much for organic stuff or eat a lot of pesticides with a food which contains mostly water and fiber, next option - adding grains or tubers to keep cost reasonable. Krauss advises against too much carbs too. Having enough of a good quality beef fat,heavy cream, butter and coconut oil solves the problem - not too much meat, not too much veggies which add to a variety and a culinary value.

@Michael Frederik , I think it could it be concluded from the R.Krauss article I referred to that carbohydrate overload is linked to a poor metabolic health,"We sort of worked our way into studies along those lines and ultimately published a study five years ago, in which we systematically compared different dietary approaches, keeping in one case, saturated fat constant and in another loading the diet up with saturated fat, and what we found is that in our study groups, the reduction of carbohydrate alone improved metabolic profile in the majority of individuals, independently of saturated fat intake." while sat. fat is healthy unless there is an overload of iron (whatever it may be).

"Peter knows all about this, in case you're wondering."What do you mean by that? That you've mentioned this before, and that Peter thus 'knows' all about this? Or something more nefarious, as in that he knows all about this inconvenient truth, but choses to ignore it?

Btw, I eat mussels and other shellfish every day along with my steak. I seem to recall that being an excellent source of manganese. Not that that's the reason I eat them.

@ Michael Frederik ,We have what we have. Snippets here and there to keep thinking. For example, the research Jane brought-up demonstrated some interesting things like Mn supplementation increased insulin secretion in mice, that is why the area under curve was decreased. Probably, not everyone would benefit from it if humans were in a mice place.

Jane, you do know that the high fat diet they gave the mice is Formula D12451, right? Have you googled what's in it? When you do, check out the amount of sucrose. Does this 45% high fat diet (made mainly of omega 6 lard and soybean oil) and casein for protein accurately simulates how anyone here eats? With all that sugar, maybe it similates SAD well. Good thing folks eating the SAD eat meat. Imagine how much worse they would be if they didn't. Wow.

Hi StipeticYes that stuff is awful. But it has vitamins and minerals added, more than enough according to conventional wisdom. The point I am making is that it isn't enough if you take absorption into account. Saturated fat increases iron absorption, and in rats at least, it inhibits absorption of manganese and copper. This is not trivial. Remember all the fuss about saturated fat causing heart disease? A high fat diet was found to cause heart disease in mice, and copper researcher Leslie Klevay repeated the experiment using the same diet and the same strain of mice. They did indeed get heart disease. Then he gave them extra copper, and guess what, no heart disease.

The experiment I am talking about now is very similar, except it's diabetes and manganese instead of heart disease and copper.

Hi Michael I meant that Peter knows all about saturated fat and iron. He and I talk about it quite often. Also about manganese. He doesn't blog about manganese because the subject is almost impossibly complicated and confusing, and he doesn't have time to do the reading. I have been reading about it for 30 years, and I believe he finds my input helpful.

You are missing the point I was making. The experiments don't do a good job of isolating the fat as an independent variable. How could they when it's not really a high fat chow to begin with. Could it be something else in the diet that increased the iron and decreased the Mn and Cu? Was everything in those experiments controlled and standardised? The answer is no. These are poor experiments and barely apply to rodents.

And I find many of your statements relative in nature and therefore unsubstanciated. You say sufficient minerals and vitamins were added. How do you know it was sufficient? How do you know the deficiencies were actually deficiencies? Always relative terms. Etc for everything else.

How do you know that the supplementation of just about any mineral or vitamin might not have had the exact same effect? Seems like these rodents were on a deficient diet of just about everything to begin with.

While your at it, show me the saturated fat in this particular high fat chow?

Not dismissing everything you say, but for someone who has 30 years of wisdom on this, you don't have much hard data to support what you claim.

However many times a poorly controlled experiment is repeated, it still is a poorly controlled experiment.

In computer programmer terms: garbage in = garbage out.

Don't you agree a better experimental model would be to put these rodents on their natural diet (whatever that is exactly) and then add in the sole variable of saturated fat?Even if this experiment was done and confirmed your claim, we'd still need to extrapolate that to humans, repeatedly...you can then start to see how far off you are from actually substantiating your claim.

Also, even if Peter (or whoever else) 'backed you up'...so what? I'm inclined to say this blog doesn't encourage deferring to authority when asked to support ones claims. [one of the reasons why I enjoy it so much!]

BTW, couple days ago Jane said that during the discussion about the possibility of Mn deficiency being a major problem http://itsthewooo.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-list-of-supplements-that-suck-voted.html -

Jane: "And in case you want to bring up Stefansson again, remember that he was drinking tea and coffee during his meat-only experiment. Tea and coffee are high in manganese."

Probably, it would be reasonable to clarify that we discussed how well her diet based mainly on a wholegrain bread and milk products would be good-health-promoting for everyone. I though it wouldn't.

Jane: "my diet comes from the work of Robert McCarrison, who studied people in northern India 100 years ago and established through animal experiments that their astonishing health was due to their diet. This diet should produce good health in anyone."

oops made a rare mistake in my comments earlier - my parsing of the idiocy was accurate but I missed something - even though they showed both twins slugging glucose for the tolerance test, then immediately cut to the results, they only gave tolerance test results to the "sugar" sack; I didn't catch it but when he moved over to the "fat" scrotum he said nothing about the OGTT but decided to give him his FASTING glucose instead - nice sleight of hand there by the pseudo-doctor. Discovered this from Dr. Biffa's piece, should have caught it myself at the time, maybe I was too incensed. SO a fasting glucose of 5.9 - quite high; that said they probably took the fasting blood a short while after the 2/3 hours post the OGTT, wouldn't surprise me.....

@Serova: Oh, lets not get too angry at her. She might be just another scientist gone so far in her path that the basic task of science is forgotten. The essence of science is that one should aim at killing one's dearest hypothesis, with fact(s). Everything else is just marketing.

Science is a tragic choice for a means of living, especially at the extremes. It is nearly impossible to let your theory go, if you have suffered for it and lost. And this is equally hard, if it has won and is quoted as the universal truth; for a while, that is :)

@StipeticNot really a high fat chow? It was D12451. High in fat, mostly lard.

You have missed the point of this paper. The authors had shown earlier that in mice with hereditary iron overload, the excess iron stops manganese from getting into mitochondria, so MnSOD has no Mn and doesn't work. This caused diabetes. Now they have shown that the same thing happens in mice without hereditary iron overload if they eat a high fat diet.

If MnSOD isn't working properly, mitochondria will be producing a lot of superoxide. Perhaps you haven't been reading Peter's work on mitochondrial superoxide.

You said: Now they have shown that the same thing happens in mice without hereditary iron overload if they eat a high fat diet.

I said earlier about the diet: Have you googled what's in it? When you do, check out the amount of sucrose.

Have you? Have you any clue of the omega-6 content of lard used these diets nowadays (which is much more likely to be involved in dibetes than saturated fat)? Take a look at Chris Masterjohn's website. He addresses it there (I think Peter has addressed this too in a past post). There is barely any saturated fat in this diet. I'd focus more on the omega-6 and the 20% sucrose in the diet (which, oddly enough does seem to mimic the SAD).

So, if the authors can't tell the simple difference between fats, and the potential influence of sucrose, how trustworthy is their work?

@GalinaYes, the people studied by McCarrison were 'great bread eaters' according to Dr Wrench writing in 1938. Would you like to read his book? It's called The Wheel of Health and is available on line. It's quite short. You could read it in an afternoon.

@StipeticThe Wikipedia entry on lard gives the saturated fat content as 39g per 100g. MUFA 45g, PUFA 11g. Are you arguing with that?

Sucrose is bad because it's white. It was observed in the Dominican Republic 100 years ago that rich people who ate white sugar often had diabetes, and poor people who ate sugar cane did not. The colour of brown sugar comes from minerals.

Jane,most probably I would read that book, even though I prefer a paper form. May be I will get it through a library loan - it is a free and convenient way to get a book to read in US. I am generally interested in food traditions and the history of food preparations. I have read books about other traditional diets, why not that one since it is discussed? I don't think it would change the fact based on my personal experience that some people (me, for example), that a bread is not the best food for many, even whole grain rye bread is problematic, which I truly miss, unlike pizza, cakes and pastry. I can't deny, that there are populations who are healthy and do not have modern diseases while eating grains and even wheat. It leaves me to suspect, that some groups of people developed better tolerance for the wheat through genetic selection, similar to Northern Europeans being mostly lactose tolerant, unlike the people in China. Many noticed disproportional amount of the people with Eastern European genetic among lowcarbers, probably, there is a reason. It is also a fact that populations which change the traditional way of eating on modernized one get disproportionately sick compare to the people who followed a modernized diet for a while. Australian Aborigines is a good example.Keeping in mind the line of the thinking I have, you can understand why I disagree with your opinion that the diet you follow and which kept an isolated group of people in India in a perfect health, would produce a perfect health for everyone. I experienced several times in my life a situation when something was perfect on paper, but didn't work for me, so I can't trust anymore to the things which contradict my own experience.

seems to suggest that the omega6:3 ratio is around 11:1. Bottom of first column. I didn't have time to chase the reference they used (11) - but the eleventh reference in the list on the right is this one - http://tinyurl.com/k5wnldq

@GalinaYes I do realise you can't eat any bread, even the wholemeal rye you make yourself. There is a serious problem here for carb intolerant people. They have to get the minerals they need to repair their pancreas so they won't be carb intolerant any more, but the meat + fat diet they follow may not supply them.

There is a recent study from China showing that white rice is associated with risk for diabetes even in people who eat a lot of vegetables. In fact one interpretation of the study is that the vegetables were causing the diabetes. That's nonsense of course, but it does suggest that however many veggies you eat you can still get diabetes if you also eat mineral-depleted food in any quantity.

'Rice intake, weight change and risk of the metabolic syndrome development among Chinese adults: the Jiangsu Nutrition Study (JIN)'http://apjcn.nhri.org.tw/server/APJCN/21/1/35.pdf

@JaneIn spite of my words I keep on wondering your take on both high fat diet and Peter's way of eating. You are a long time listener to this blog, so you should be aware of the two quite well conducted mice experiments, both of which are against your warnings.

The older one, published in Nature, had wild type mice on over 80% coconut fat diet, with protein as casein and the tiny carbohydrate as sugar.

The fresher one (2011?) was performed using standard lab mice and with the "standard" high fat diet except that it was done totally without sucrose.

No deterioration of health was found in either. Sucrose combined with the typical laboratory mice brand and excess Pufa (the Pufa content of lab mice food has also been reported in this blog, and it was much higher than the wikipedia value cited by you) added to the lab chow seems to be a good way of damaging mice. But it does not really prove your point in mice or in people.

With kind regards,LeenaSA former full time chronic, now well and symptom free for 14th year. Good times started after I changed "healthy foods with grains" to low carb, high animal fat food.

@LeenaSIt would be interesting to know whether coconut oil increases iron absorption like some other fats do. Perhaps it doesn't. There is a study showing that many kinds of fatty acid can carry iron across artificial membranes, and the one that carried the most wasn't saturated at all, it was linoleic acid. Palmitic acid carried the least. So it isn't saturated vs unsaturated at all.

However it does look as if certain kinds of saturated fats might be able to change the activity of the transporter that carries iron and manganese, so that it carries more iron and less manganese.

The problem with iron is that unlike other metals it doesn't really get excreted. Iron overload has been found in A LOT of diseases.

'Transport of Fe2+ across lipid bilayers: possible role of fatty acids'http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3828339'Manganese absorption and retention in rats is affected by the type of dietary fat'http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11697763

I feel that eating bread is perfectly OK (though I would never consider doing so myself) provided you have considered the potential consequences and are happy to go ahead. I struggle with the concept of recommending it to others, who may not have a perfect diet, and who may be unaware of the consequences of a hiccup. If you live in Newark and develop a gluten ataxia (without any gut signs) you will be referred to Queen’s Medical in Nottingham. You will be labelled as having an idiopathic neurodegenerative disease and provided with a wheelchair. Only the very luckiest people would be referred to Sheffield where Dr Hadjivassiliou would almost certainly suggest a year’s trial on a gluten free diet. Look, no wheelchair. This is the risk from eating bread in a modern UK diet.

Iron is interesting. Its storage and utilisation are, obviously, controlled by the mitochondria. This is where haem is synthesised and where rather a lot of FeS clusters live. Unhappy mitochondria might well lead to unhappy iron metabolism. PUFA make for unhappy mitochondria. I have discussed before my view that PUFA = cirrhosis. If inadequate iron is available to generate cirrhosis copper will do the job perfectly well. The copper is frequently there on histology, from clinical canine patients with cirrhosis, ask my wife.

Both D12492 and D12451 are described as high fat diets by research groups (of the most execrable standards) when they are in fact high PUFA plus sucrose diets. F3666 is a high fat diet. Even this is far too high in PUFA for health. The fat in D12492 and D12451 is discussed here, the original analysis markedly underestimated PUFA content.

http://www.researchdiets.com/blog/lard-fatty-acid-profile-update

The concept that Stefansson and Andersen could gain adequate Mn from tea and coffee suggest that we have little to fear from an all meat, iron loaded diet just so long as our tea drinking is adequate. We Brits should be fine…

@Peter,Do you think that it is possible that some people are better adapted to live on bread than others, and is it likely that such adaptation made them prone to store iron more efficiently and turned red meat for them in a less healthy choice?It is what I guess just from the position of a human logic and common sense. I know that science operates on much more than that.

@Jane, I am angry at the people who use their education and qualifications to scare others, even diabetics, into eating whole grains and avoiding red meat and butter. You devoted decades of your life to prove the danger of eating red meat. LeenaS's comment redirected my mind into the thinking about people like you as tragic figures and my anger went away. I do not want you to suffer.

Galina, yes. No toxin kills everyone unless the challenge is very, very extreme. A new selection pressure will result in genetic adaptation too. Just as some people can eat the SAD and stay slim and healthy for many years, so too some can undoubtedly eat bread. I'm not one of them.

"I feel that eating bread is perfectly OK (though I would never consider doing so myself) provided you have considered the potential consequences and are happy to go ahead" ---> with this understated rhetoric, no need to show your British passport @ the security check-point! :)[you are British, right?...if not, the internet is a lovely place to make a fool of ones self]

Yes, I'm a Brit, Nottingham born and bred from very mixed genetics. Family is split between Nottingham and Sheffield. My dad helped build Queen's Medical. Embarrassing that the Nottingham neurology department is so dangerous and anti Sheffield, who seem to have it correct...

Peter, thanks for the updated lard analysis. It seems we have oleate 35, linoleate 23, palmitate 20 and stearate 10. This is interesting because in the paper about transport of iron across lipid bilayers, oleate carried nearly as much as linoleate which carried the most. I'd say lard is to be avoided if you're a lab mouse and don't want diabetes.

I hear what you say about bread. I think it's possible that white bread can permanently damage the immune system.

@SerovaI have devoted decades of my life to finding out how biology works, not to proving the danger of eating red meat. Refined carbs are far worse.

Like Peter, I have nothing against bread as long as I do not have to eat it. My country is famous for whole grains and dark fermented breads; yet I tolerate these no better than their white variants. Unfortunately it took me 40 years to find that out. The color of sugar does not count, either. It's all in quantities. Trading grain and sugar calories for animal fats has been the best health promoting lifestyle change for me so far.

Doing the trick with butter, lard and bone broths is all wrong, of course. Yet it is the only way I stay symptom free, in spite of our bread and veggies loving nutrition scientists... who, btw, tend to cherry pick their data much like net vegans and you, Jane, in these last comments. Eventually it gets just boring. Sorry.

@LeenaSIt took you 40 years to find out you can't tolerate bread? How then can you be sure your symptoms weren't due to white bread and white sugar? Mild micronutrient deficiencies mean your body works quite well for a while but it can't repair itself properly.

Of course if you exchange grains and sugar for animal fats your health will improve. You're eliminating foods which have had micronutrients removed, and you're getting more fat-soluble vitamins.

Jane:Nowadays I can tolerate some pure, white and deadly sugar, if carbohydrate load is not high and if the rest of the food is ok. Yet I cannot tolerate half a slice of whole grain, fully fermented rye bread.

I keep on trying grains, once or twice a year. Foolishness maybe, but it is interesting, since all my former food allergies (except fish) are gone, thanks to LCHF. Symptoms return within minutes and last a few days.

Sounds to me like you've lost 'oral tolerance' for grain proteins. If you stop eating something entirely this can happen. Your immune system isn't supposed to react to food proteins any more than it's suppposed to react to your own proteins.

There are cells called regulatory T cells which are specific for a particular protein (eg gluten) and suppress unwanted reactions. Coeliac patients have regulatory T cells that don't work properly.

Jane, yes, my tolerance for many proteins has always been compromised. It started at a mature age of 11 months. But it is strongly modulated by carb dose. So, now I'm symptom free, but only on LoCarb, HiSFA and lowish protein. However, I was never symptom free before. And now I tolerate former allergens better (animal dust, pollen, edible proteins), not worse than before.

This test has continued for 13+ years, and my tolerance is still improving, not degrading. I no longer react against pollen, eggs and nuts, and I can stay inside with dogs. Maybe one day I can sleep with a cat and eat fish? Grains are not a big deal, compared to that :)

Leena, you are so much like my son! I had trouble to introduce any protein into his diet when he was a baby , after one year he could eat only small amount of rabbit meat, after 3 years he could have other meats, but not eggs and fish. Fish is the only allergy which didn't go away with removing bread from his diet, but he eats rice and buckwheat without a problem. My allergy on fish is also here to stay, but I now can visit people with cats for extended periods, just can't sleep in their houses. Why fish is so problematic? It is a rhetoric question.Jane, many people report resolving or diminishing of allergy issues when they stop eating grains, and resuming of allergies after re-introducing grains, especially wheat, into their diets. It doesn't exactly fit your explanation.

@LeenaSIt was shown recently that the gut immune system is regulated by bacteria. Fibre fermentation encourages regulatory T cells. I wonder if the reason your problems started at such an early age is that your mother did not pass on to you the 'right' gut bacteria.'Commensal microbe-derived butyrate induces the differentiation of colonic regulatory T cells'http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12721.html

@GalinaYou once told me that Russians consider wholemeal bread inferior. I concluded from this that refined rye flour was a likely cause of your family's health problems. You did not argue against this idea. Are you now saying that your son's allergies were caused by wholemeal bread?

Jane,I am afraid that my son got his allergies from his parents, he developed eczema rush at the age one month, way before receiving any food except my breast milk. His first regular food was oatmeal at the age of 6 months. I followed all recommendations of anty-allergy diet as I understood it then - no tomatoes, smoked meats, citruses and so on. I don't think that rye bread being made out of refined flour made a difference because while it was consumed daily, it was not the main ingredient. A main meal of the day was normally a cabbage soup, a small amount of meat with potatoes/buckwheat on a side + salad made with raw fresh or fermented vegetables,+ one slice of bread, a tea.Whole flour was considered to be inferior one when I was growing up, now it is changing due to modern-day ideas borrowed mostly from the western countries, there low-fat products everywhere on store shelves. The general crowd in a public transportation system still looks thin, but the number of fat people, especially children is on the rise. When I was at school 1967-1977, no student was fat there. Mostly were skinny, I was slightly plump , but not enough to be teased for it.

Jane: My mother's gut flora could well have been compromised, too, but carbohydrate intolerance (not a disease, just a trend) seems to run strong within the family, even when local, fermented food is used. I have seen symptoms come and go in generations directly before and after me. So no, it is neither the lack of whole grains or fermented goods, nor it is the abundance of white sugar or white flour - or obesity, for that matter. It must be hard trying to do the guesswork from far away, but sorry, you just missed here.

Galina:With kwasniewski (or LCHF, whatever you call it) type of eating I can actually taste even fish. Before I turned sick on the smell only; now I just turn little itchy - and sleep four or so extra hours on the night after a meal containing fish... provided that rest of the meal is reasonable. Tried that 3 or 4 times, not willing to repeat experiment often but survive it, unolike ever before. So, maybe someday...

Every time when I read about the importance of a vaginal birth for the development of a good immunity, I can't hold myself from regrets that it didn't happen in my case - my mom has zero allergies and almost never has a headache, unlike me. I look like her, but all my health issues came from my father - allergies, migraines, kidney stones (one episode while eating low-fat/low red meat diet if anybody would jump to say it was LCarbing to blame). Fortunately, I didn't develop ischemia by the age 40 like him, and I didn't die at 51.

The so called "excellent" health of "natives" in the late 19th/20th was entirely relative to the utterly abysmal health of contemporary Westerners (eg TB, syphilis, rotten teeth, rickets, childhood malnutrition). In absolute terms many of the "natives" were actually quite unhealthy.

Cane juice contains negligible minerals

Fructans in wheat and rye are proven causes of IBS. It makes no difference whether these grains are wholemeal or not.

White rice promotes diabetes and obesity because it a high GI/low fibre product - not because it is low in minerals.

About Me

I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory.
I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

Organisation (or lack of it)!

The "labels" function on this blog has been used to function as an index and I've tended to group similar subjects together by using labels starting with identical text. If they're numbered within a similar label, start with (1). The archive is predominantly to show the posts I've put up in the last month, if people want to keep track of recent goings on. I might change it to the previous week if I ever get to time to put up enough posts in a week to justify it. That seems to be the best I can do within the limits of this blogging software!